Astronomy Casthttp://www.astronomycast.com
Take a facts-based journey through the universe.2015-03-02T18:33:13Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00

Ep. 368: Searching for the Aether Wind: the Michelson–Morley Experimenthttp://www.astronomycast.com/2015/03/ep-368-searching-for-the-aether-wind-the-michelson-morley-experiment/
2015-03-02T16:24:02ZWaves move through a medium, like water or air. So it seemed logical to search for a medium that light waves move through. The Michelson-Morley Experiment attempted to search for this medium, known as the “luminiferous aether”. The experiment gave a negative result, and helped set the stage for the theory of General Relativity.

]]>Ep. 367: Spitzer does Exoplanetshttp://www.astronomycast.com/2015/02/ep-367-spitzer-does-exoplanets/
2015-02-17T16:35:10ZWe’ve spent the last few weeks talking about different ways astronomers are searching for exoplanets. But now we reach the most exciting part of this story: actually imaging these planets directly. Today we’re going to talk about the work NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has done viewing the atmospheres of distant planets.

]]>Ep. 366: HARPS Spectrographhttp://www.astronomycast.com/2015/02/ep-366-harps-spectrograph/
2015-02-09T21:01:08ZAlmost all the planet hunting has been done from space. But there’s a new instrument installed on the European Southern Observatory’s 3.6 meter telescope called the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher which has already turned up 130 planets. Is this the future? Searching for planets from the ground?

The European Gaia spacecraft launched about a year ago with the ambitious goal of mapping one billion years in the Milky Way. That’s 1% of all the stars in our entire galaxy, which it will monitor about 70 times over its 5-year mission. If all goes well, we’ll learn an enormous amount about the structure, movements and evolution of the stars in our galaxy. It’ll even find half a million quasars.

]]>Ep. 364: The COROT Missionhttp://www.astronomycast.com/2015/01/ep-364-the-corot-mission/
2015-01-26T17:14:11ZBefore NASA’s Kepler mission searched for exoplanets using the transit method, there was the European COROT mission, launched in 2006. It was sent to search for planets with short orbital periods and find solar oscillations in stars. It was an incredibly productive mission, and the focus of today’s show.

]]>Ep. 363: Where Did Earth’s Water Come From?http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/01/ep-363-where-did-earths-water-come-from/
2015-01-21T16:00:26ZWhere on Earth did our water come from. Well, obviously not from Earth, of course, but from space. But did it come from comets, or did the water form naturally right here in the Solar System, and the Earth just scooped it up??

]]>Ep. 362: Modern Women: Carolyn Porcohttp://www.astronomycast.com/2015/01/ep-362-modern-women-carolyn-porco/
2015-01-12T19:58:35ZIt hard to think of a more influential modern planetary scientist than Carolyn Porco, the leader of the imaging team for NASA’s Cassini mission exploring Saturn. But before Cassini, Porco was involved in Voyager missions, and she’ll be leading up the imaging team for New Horizons.

]]>Ep. 361: Modern Women: Maria Zuberhttp://www.astronomycast.com/2015/01/ep-361-modern-women-maria-zuber/
2015-01-05T17:07:13ZMaria Zuber is one of the hardest working scientists in planetary science, being a part of six different space missions to explore the Solar System. Currently, she’s the lead investigator for NASA’s GRAIL mission.

Transcript

Fraser Cain: Astronomy Cast Episode 361, Maria Zuber. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, your weekly facts based journey through the Cosmos. We help you understand not only what we know but how we know what we know.

My name is Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today, and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the Director of CosmoQuest. Hey, Pamela, how are you doing?

Pamela Gay: I’m doing well. How are you doing, Frazier?

Fraser Cain: Great. We’re recording this just moments before Newtonmas. So – which is December 25th.

Pamela Gay: There are three days of Die Hard remaining.

Fraser Cain: Three days of Die Hard remaining.

Pamela Gay: There’s the five Die Hard episodes. And instead of the 12 days of Christmas or the ten days of Cards against Humanity, we’re celebrating the five days of Die Hard in our house.

Fraser Cain: Nerds. But I know the feeling. Now, do we have any announcements this week, any you want to mention, you want to plug?

Pamela Gay: If you need a year-end tax donation help, we can provide you a tax donation in the United States through SIUE for your donations to Cosmo Quest in the European Union, for your donations to 365 Days of Astronomy. And you know, Astronomy Cast is also here in the US, and we’re just trying to figure out how to make the next year happen. And we are losing some of our sponsors, so if your company is interested in sponsoring our shows, drop me an email, info@astronomycast.com.

Fraser Cain: Perfect. Okay. Let’s get cracking.

Maria Zuber is one of the hardest working scientists in planetary exploration. Being a part of six different space missions to explore the solar system, and currently, she’s the lead investigator for NASA’s ground mission. All right, Pamela, so who is Maria Zuber and why did you select her?

Pamela Gay: I selected her because she’s someone that I think no one knows her name well enough. When you ask for big names in Planetary Science, Allen Stern’s name always comes up. Karen Porka’s name always comes up.

Fraser Cain: Steve Squires.

Pamela Gay: Yeah. There’s all these – Jim Bell – there’s just certain names that come up over and over and over again. But then when you go to a conference and you look to see who takes the podium over and over again to present research session after session, object after object, it’s this woman from MIT. And I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word about her. And unfortunately, I’ve never actually heard anyone say a word about her.

But as you pointed out, she’s part of a large number of missions, and I’ve simply been consistently impressed with what she does and how well she carries herself and carries her mission. So I wanted to bring her up as part of the Series.

Fraser Cain: All right. So, let’s start with the missions because I think that’s – you know, that’s where her entire body of work has – has really recently really played out. So where do you want to – which mission do you want to start with?

Pamela Gay: Well, might as well start for the one where she is principal investigator. And this is the NASA grail mission, two different spacecraft, Ebb and Flow, as they were named by people volunteering names all across the United States. These are two little spacecraft that are mapping the gravity profile of the moon by flying very low to its surface, sometimes just a few kilometers above, usually about 20 kilometers above.

And the way they’re mapping out the gravity is they’re maintaining laser contact between themselves and when they’re within viewability of the planet earth, laser contact with the planet earth. And these lasers are used to very carefully measure the timing between the different spacecraft, so they’re able to see how the orbits vary as they go over more high gravity and low gravity areas of the moon.

Fraser Cain: Right. They’ve done this with earth as well, and it’s a wonderful experiment because the two spacecraft – I’m holding out a hand so unfortunately the podcast listeners won’t be able to see this – but the two spacecraft know how far each other are apart with absolute precision with these lasers that they’re shooting back and forth.

And then, as they go over the various just like craters and pockets of more density, one spacecraft gets pulled a little faster than the other one. And they measure a distance between them. And then, the other one is able to sort of come back and catch up. And then, they triangulate with the earth. And they’ve produced these beautiful images. They call them – what do they call – GEO –

Pamela Gay: Gravity maps, geo maps.

Fraser Cain: Geo map, yeah. And it kind of looks like a potato when you – because they’ll sort of – they’ll make the – they’ll artificially change the scale. Right? And so, you can see sort of this great, big lumpy earth and this great big lumpy – in this case, the lumpy moon that shows you sort of where the pockets of high density are. And I always just imagine this mysterious hidden treasure in those places of higher density and gravity.

Pamela Gay: And what’s amazing is when you start combining these geodesies with the laser altimetry, which tells us exactly how high and low the different surface bits are. You start to be able to get this very careful map of, well; of course this area has more gravity. It has a mountain. So there’s more stuff.

But this other area, it has a deep crater. All of that material is compacted so you’re still getting higher gravity but now you’re getting the higher gravity from an area that’s compacted. It’s all sorts of neat things that come out where you can tell the difference between just a nice normal dense region, a nice normal not so dense region and then all of the complexities that incur from, well, cratering events in the past.

And this is a complicated mission. Here on Earth when we map out gravity, we have the benefit of being able to be in constant contact with the spacecraft as it flies over the Earth. With the moon, there’s that annoying backside, dark side, as it’s locally called, where we can’t see a spacecraft. And here on Earth, they do it from a much higher altitude because of our atmosphere.

If you think about it, the occasional 20 kilometers – well, the often 20-some-odd kilometers up that these spacecraft are orbiting at, well, we’ve now had humans jump from balloons, from higher altitudes down to the surface of the Earth. And these spacecraft have gotten as low as seven kilometer while functionally carrying on their mission and not trying to commit suicide. And those start to be altitudes that you expect jetliners to be at and we’re orbiting spacecraft close to the moon at those altitudes.

Fraser Cain: Well, but the downside of doing that kind of a mission with that low altitude is it’s not stable and as the spacecraft have learned. Because they crashed them into the surface back in 2012.

Pamela Gay: And we’re still working to figure out all of the science and so it’s one of these things of, yes, we did sacrifice the spacecraft in order to get a wealth of science. It is going to take us still several more years to completely untangle and fully understand by combining it with data that we’re getting from the lunar reconnaissance orbiter, which is another mission that Maria Zuber was involved in.

She, on that particular mission, was the investigative lead of the laser ranger. This is a set of lasers that will fire from the spacecraft down to the surface of the moon and measure the amount of time and the quality of the return of the laser light as it comes back up to the spacecraft. This allows them to get ideas of the texture of the surface while also very precisely measuring the distance to the surface. So this is very complimentary work, where she’s combining the laser ranging work. She was Deputy Principle Investigator on the instrument itself, the lunar orbiter laser altimeter.

And so, she’s put all of these different positions together from principle investigator of one spacecraft to Deputy Principle Investigator of an instrument and investigation lead for the science to really give us a deep – literally, deep understanding of the lunar surface.

Fraser Cain: Actually – I said in my intro that she’s been on six missions – actually, she’s been in ten. She’s been a team member on ten NASA planetary missions.

Pamela Gay: So going all the way back, she did laser altimetry with Mars observer. She did gravity and altimetry team for Clementine. She was Deputy Principle Investigator on the orbiter laser altimeter on Mars Global Surveyor. She was Team Leader and Laser Ranging Investigator for near – the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Mission, Co-Investigator and lead of the Geo Physics investigation on NASA Messenger, which is where I first encountered her.

She was Team Lead for the Radio Science Gravity Investigation, a Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Co-Investigator on Dawn’s [inaudible] [00:12:05] to Vesta and Series, Deputy Principle Investigator as we started with the lunar orbiter laser altimetry instrument on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. So she just mission after mission after mission has done this consistent and amazing body of work on mapping out the surfaces and the gravity of rocky bodies all over our solar system.

Fraser Cain: And the youngest of the people that we’ve been profiling so far. She’s only in her mid-50s, which is just amazing to have that much sort of under your belt already at that age.

Pamela Gay: She’s no nonsense. She’s just I’m gonna get the science done and she does all of this while – she’s not just like every day faculty member. She’s the Vice President for Research in the EA Grinswald Professor of Geo Physics, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So this is a woman who has massive bureaucratic responsibilities at one of the world’s top research institutions, is working on a large number of NASA spacecraft and is still churning out amazing research with all of the resources that she has access to.

Fraser Cain: So how did she get her start then? Let’s go through her resume.

Pamela Gay: Well, she went to the University of Pennsylvania, graduated in 1980 so started with regular good ole state education. She went on Brown University, which is kind of one of the big universities that you see Geo Physics people passing through.

She finished with her Ph.D. in 1986 from Brown University. She did her dissertation on unstable deformation and layered media, which I think is the fanciest way I have ever encountered for someone to phrase. Soil comes in layers. Sometimes it’s not flat. And that’s basically what that translates into is she studied what are the factors that lead to stratified surfaces [inaudible] [00:14:42] wrinkled and ridged and folded and all of the different things that occur on rocky bodies.

From there, she went on to – she’s worked a whole variety of different places from the National Research Council to she spent time at Goddard Space Flight Center, to being a professor at Johns Hopkins University where she was for many, many years. And then, in ’95 she went to Massachusetts’s Institute of Technology. So she’s very much an East Coast kind of woman, which I have to respect as being an East Coaster trapped in the mid-West myself.

And it’s just one of those resumes that when you download it, it’s over 20 pages. And she’s removed everything that isn’t essential. It is strictly peer reviewed national and international service and awesomeness.

Fraser Cain: And so, what then – I mean, I know that she serves on a pile of boards and has all of these responsibilities, in addition – so what are some of the other sort of roles that she plays?

Pamela Gay: So she’s also – or she was until 2012 – a guest investigator at the Department of Geology and Geo Physics Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. So she combines when she’s studying rocky bodies trying to understand our own planet Earth with working to understand Mars, the moon, various asteroids, looking at Mercury. And she’s also been a visiting scholar at Radcliffe Institute across the city of Boston. And she – as I said, she spent numerous years at Johns Hopkins University in a variety of different roles.

Fraser Cain: That’s awesome. So let’s talk a bit – well, one question which I’ve been asking you with every person that we’ve been talking about – have you had a chance to meet her?

Pamela Gay: Yes. I’m pretty sure she has absolutely no memory of me. I’ve seen her give I don’t know how many talks at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference and the European Planetary Sciences Conference. And I’ve more than once bumped into her and done the requisite that was a very good talk, and she probably has absolutely no memory of me.

Pamela Gay: Yeah. When you go to these conferences there are certain speakers that you listen to because you know they’re going to convey a great deal of information that you need to know. And there are those that you know are going to convey a beautiful story that is worth listening to.

And then, there are those that are simply going to do the very clinical but – I’m trying to figure out how to say this correctly – it’s the journalistic just the facts, ma’am, kind of – or I guess detective work just the facts that cuts through the chase and does it in a way where you’re captivated but none of the flowery language or special fonts are required. And she’s one of those people that does the just the facts talk that enraptures you with how much information is coming out beautifully conveyed.

Fraser Cain: So the next – I think we talked about the grail mission. We talked about a couple of other missions. The big one that’s coming up now is Dawn is gonna be arriving at Series, and really soon now. I mean, we are not far away –

Pamela Gay: This summer, six months away.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. For another one of these missions that’s been out there. And we’ve been following it for years and years, but it’s already [inaudible] [00:19:02] which I know you had a lot of work in helping with the education and outreach and mapping [inaudible]. So what is the work that’s gonna be happening with Series?

Pamela Gay: It’s in many ways a rinse and a repeat look at new worlds. At a certain level you want to replicate the same experiments over and over and over and very controlled parameters. Well, we can’t really purposely turn the gravity on and off on an asteroid or very one particular mineral in its surface. But what we can do is visit a variety of different worlds, perform the exact same experiments on those variety of different worlds and see what we can learn by letting nature vary the parameters.

And this is something that you really see occurring in Dr. Zuber’s research where first we went to Vesta, which is on the dry side of the water line that is in our solar system that is kind of the line of demarcation that divides where worlds could form and have water with the outer worlds and where the young sun would have essentially dried out all the volatiles while the worlds were still young.

Series formed on the opposite side of that water line from Vesta. We’ve orbited Vesta. We’ve studied its geology to the best of our abilities. We’ve imaged it in high resolution looking to try and understand the folding, the bouldering, the deformation of craters, the way [inaudible] [00:20:50] have formed. And now we’re going out to Series, where it’s admittedly a bit larger of a world, but more importantly, it formed on the other side of that water line, not too different a position compared to the rest of the asteroids. It’s still part of the asteroid belt. It’s just the other side of that asteroid belt.

And it has the potential to have volatiles left over from its formation. So now we’re going to replicate the imaging sets that were done, the spectroscopy, all of the different experiments to try and understand how does that one change in parameter along with the change in mass affect the way one of these small worlds is formed.

Fraser Cain: And so, we’re gonna get – I mean, as it relates to the work Dr. Zuber is doing – we are gonna be getting this gravity map. Up to some extent we’re gonna get – understand the bid of the surface geology, the density, of Series and how it compares to what we learned with Vesta. Right?

Pamela Gay: Exactly. And this is also going on to be compared with work that she’s done at Mercury with Messenger, work that’s been done at Mars with Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Surveyor and work that is still being done by Lenore Reconnaissance Orbiter with its laser altimeter and work that is still being completely analyzed that came from the Ebb and Flow grail spacecraft.

Fraser Cain: Do you ever – I mean, I know you’re an Astronomer. You focus on sort of Astro Physics Astronomy. Do you ever wish you were a planetary scientist? Do you ever wish you had gone down that path? Was that ever a possibility for you?

Pamela Gay: So I have to admit that I am someone that when I discovered how much organic chemistry was involved in Geo Physics sort of went, “Oh, dear God, no.” And this simply has to do with we are all better and worse at different things. And for me, proper nouns is not a skill set I have. And organic chemistry the formation of complex molecules, the mineralogy, all of those things were things that I simply have no passion for and instead sort of have a desire to go, “Please. I will listen. I will enjoy your analysis. Don’t make me do that.”

The skill set that these people have, they have almost the same physics background I have, less plasmas. But they also have to know so much chemistry, so much hydrology. And whereas in Astrophysics it’s all about the P-Chem, which I love P-Chem, how atoms interact, how quantum states emerge and evolve in different pressures and temperatures, magnetic fields play a completely different role in astronomy.

That need to understand things that form molecules, that form complex molecules, that form molecules that interact and form in different geometries, that’s a skill set I don’t have and didn’t want to have and would have gone into animal behavior before I went into organic chemistry if needed to – there are so many other paths I would have gone down first.

Fraser Cain: Really?

Pamela Gay: But I love learning what these people learn and that’s the great thing about what you and I do is I’m sure there’s things that you look at that the scientists that we read the results from have done and you’re just like, “Whoa. So glad that wasn’t me.”

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

Pamela Gay: And so much respect for the people who have gone out and done this detailed work.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. So we’re gonna probably wrap this up pretty shortly, but one thing that I highly recommend people do is they go and check out Dr. Zuber’s resume. And I’m sure this is the same document that we’re both looking at. And I’m not sure how many pages it is, 30 or 40 pages?

Pamela Gay: 27 pages.

Fraser Cain: 27 pages, that’s right. That’s the one. Okay. Great. And so, just for example, professional involvement is a full page of – no, two pages, right? And things like President’s Commission on Implementation of the United States exploration policy in 2004, the program committee for the MIT Darwin Bicentennial Conference in 2009. Like I have never in my life seen a body of work so well documented and so sort of laid out in this way that I think when people ask us like how can you get to be in a career in Astronomy, a career in Space, what kinds of things should you do?

Look up Maria Zuber’s resume because it is an action plan to see what a person who has really thrown herself 100 percent at this question has generated. It tells you the kinds of research that she’s worked on, the kinds of professional community she’s been a part of, the awards that she’s won. This is – this is what it takes and she is like the perfect example of it.

Pamela Gay: And something that I deeply – again, I don’t really even have the word for it – deeply appreciate seems like kind of the wrong word – about her CV, her Curriculum Vita resume, for those of you in normal jobs outside of academia. I know that I over the years have begun to drop off older things from my CV. It’s like, “Ah, no one’s gonna care about the awards I won as an undergrad. No one’s gonna care about” – she hasn’t done that. So this is really one of those things that you can look at and go, “Hey, I got that award when I was her age. That’s kinda cool.”

And there’s this ability to go through and see how everything builds one thing upon the other and how all of us start with very similar beginnings. And it’s what we choose to do as we go along. It’s also interesting to look at how her publications have changed in terms of as an early career scientist if you scroll all the way back in her stuff, it’s first author, first author, first author, first author.

And then she starts getting more and more involved in teams and you see her students taking the first authorship role more and more often and that evolution to being last author as she became a team lead. All these small things that tell you so much about who the person is and leave nothing to the imagination, it’s just kind of awesome.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. No. I counted 28 papers published in 2014 of which she wasn’t the lead author on any of them. She was part of the team, but then as you said, you go back to her first papers back in 1980 – in the 1980s. And she’s all the first author, so that is – that is the evolution that a working scientist makes as you become more and more of a team leader and a manager, as opposed to working hard in your office on your research to helping a team take advantage of your knowledge and experience to get the best science they can, so yeah.

Pamela Gay: And I just love that she includes that first paper she wrote as, I’m guessing it was as an undergrad with her advisor that’s on the Virgo Cluster. It’s completely not related to anything else in her research, but it’s a paper she did while she was an undergraduate. So it’s there.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. So again, if you have any interest at all in trying to create a lifelong career in science, base science or science, check out her resume. Because that should be your blueprint for success.

Fraser Cain: Right. Okay. Well, next week we’re gonna talk about somebody that I hope everybody has heard about, which is gonna be Dr. Carolyn Porka who works on the Cassini Mission.

Pamela Gay: And on New Horizons.

Fraser Cain: Among other things, yeah, among everything.

Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. So we’ll be talking about Carolyn Porka, who I think both of us have had a chance to talk to, so.

Pamela Gay: Yes.

Fraser Cain: Very cool. Okay. Well, thank you very much, Pamela. And we’ll talk to you next week.

Pamela Gay: Okay. Sounds good.

Male Speaker: Thanks for listening to Astronomy Cast, a non-profit resource provide by Astrosphere, New Media Association, Frazier Cane and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can find show notes and transcripts for every episode at Astronomycast.com. You can email us at info@astronomycast.com, tweet us at Astronomy Cast, like us on Facebook or circle us on Google Plus.

We record our show live on Google Plus every Monday at 12:00 p.m. Pacific, 3:00 p.m. Eastern or 2000 Greenwich Mean Time. If you missed the live event you can always catch up over at Cosmoquest.org.

If you enjoy Astronomy Cast, why not give us a donation. It helps us pay for bandwidth, transcripts and show notes. Just click the donate link on the website. All donations are tax deductible for US residents. You can support the show for free, too. Write a review or recommend us to your friends. Every little bit helps. Click support the show on our website to see some suggestions.

To subscribe to the show, point your podcasting software at AstronomyCast.com/podcast.xml or subscribe directly from iTunes. Our music is provided by Travis Searle and the show is edited by Preston Gibson.

]]>Ep. 360: Modern Women: Jocelyn Bell Burnellhttp://www.astronomycast.com/2014/12/ep-360-modern-women-jocelyn-bell-burnell/
2014-12-29T21:55:35ZJocelyn Bell Burnell is an Irish astronomer, best known for being part of the team that discovered pulsars, and the following controversy when she was excluded from the Nobel Prize winning team.

Transcript

Fraser Cain: Astronomy Cast; Episode 360. Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly fact-based journey through the Cosmos. We’ll help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. My name is Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today. And with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. And the director of Cosmo Quest. Hey, Pamela, how you doing?

Dr. Pamela Gay: I’m doing well. How are you doing, Fraser?

Fraser Cain: Good. Good. I’m feeling a little sniffly today so I reserve the right to sneeze once or twice during the recording but I know Preston will remove that so it’ll never happen. You’ve got a bit of an announcement about some things that people can wear.

Dr. Pamela Gay: I do. So we’ve had a lot of people saying hey, we know Astronomy Cast t-shirts exist, can we get some? And the answer is yes. If you go over to Astrogear.spreadshirt.com we have mugs, we have t-shirts and you can customize them. We have boy cut and girl cut. You can pick out the colors you’d like them to be in. Proceeds from buying these shirts goes to support keeping all of our programs running. Basically you’re paying for the servers if you buy mugs and t-shirts and sweatshirts. So please buy mugs and t-shirts and sweatshirts at Astrogear.spreadshirt.com.

Fraser Cain: That’s awesome. All right. So Pamela, we’ve got something special this week. We’ve got a new sponsor for Astronomy Cast and that is Casper.com. And they make mattresses. The cool thing with this is they sent us both individually mattresses to test out. Did you get yours?

Dr. Pamela Gay: I did. And it was this crazy situation where I kind of forgot to tell my husband there was a mattress coming and he opens the front door and there’s a box that is just big enough for a human to fit in, which is actually really tiny when you think about mattresses.

Fraser Cain: Well, you got like the twin size one or the smaller one, right?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: Yeah, so I got the king size one and what’s amazing is I don’t think the box for the kind size one was any bigger than the one you had and there was like – I don’t know what laws of physics they broke to get this mattress in there but it was folded and rolled so they gave you this special knife to cut the thing open and then it just sort of inflated. You had a full-on king size mattress and it was super comfortable. We have actually gotten rid of the old mattress and we’re using the Casper mattress. It’s a terrific mattress so we now having tested it out, I’m really glad we’ve got them as a sponsor for Astronomy Cast.

Dr. Pamela Gay: I have to say the same thing. I got an extra large twin one to put on the daybed where I do a lot of reading and fussing around on my iPad and all that stuff. Initially, I just kind of put it on top of the old mattress and that lasted for about two days and then the old mattress kind of got ditched and it’s awesome. It’s squishy but firmish and it doesn’t have the problems that our Tempur-Pedic mattress has of making you super hot.

Fraser Cain: Right, exactly. You’re not up against this kind of foam that gets you really hot. It’s great. So the good folks at Casper, in addition to sponsoring Astronomy Cast, are providing you with a discount on your own mattress. So if you go to Casper.com/astro and then if you use the promo code Astro, you can get $50 off your own mattress and they will ship it to you, I think anywhere in the United States.

So Jocelyn Bell Burnell is an Irish astronomer best known for being part of the team that discovered pulsars and I love this story, and the following controversy when she was excluded from the Nobel Prize-winning team. This is a theme. Huh?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah, themes sometime happen. Our original theme was awesome modern astronomers and I went down the list of awesome women who are still alive who forced textbooks to get rewritten or led to the things that we all learned the names of and it just happened that a lot of these women did things that had they been a guy, probably would’ve gotten them a Nobel Prize but not a guy.

Fraser Cain: Nobel Prize, please. Okay. So let’s start with – I think we’ve sort of done this before but let’s start with the big discovery that Jocelyn Bell really helped with and then we’ll kind of go back around and actually talk about her history and what she’s been working on. And that was Pulsars.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Right. So she was a graduate student in the 1960s and while a student at Cambridge, she worked on building a large radio facility to look at the sky in literally a different color, in this case, radio light instead of optical light, and when she started getting her data, there was this – what in a very British way they refer to as scruff in the signal.

Fraser Cain: Isn’t that when they were looking for birdpoop back in the Cosmic micro –

Dr. Pamela Gay: No, no, that was the Cosmic –

Fraser Cain: Yeah, no, I understand but it’s the same thing. I think the Brits would’ve called that scruff.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Probably. Probably. So in her data of this one particular place in the sky, and that’s always a hint, is it’s that one place in the sky, there was this bit of scruff and she would take all the data she could on this object and it just seemed to be ticking like a clock once a second. She basically had to chase down her advisor and say look, no, really, this is real. And he didn’t want to believe her originally. And then when he did believe her, they of course published the results. And then he would do big conferences and she’d end up having to speak but he wasn’t the one inviting her.

It just kind of went on like that for a good long time. It was this awesome discovery that at the end of the day, they had to figure out what could possibly be making a ticking noise, or in this case, a ticking light signal that got translated into noise once a second, and the only answer that made sense –

Fraser Cain: Aliens.

Dr. Pamela Gay: – given – well, they did call it the little green men at some point.

Fraser Cain: I know.

Dr. Pamela Gay: But aliens aside, neutron stars are one of the few objects out there capable of holding themselves together while rotating that rapidly, and through a variety of different types of observations, it was narrowed down to by golly, this is a neutron star rotating and eventually it was figured out that it has a magnetic field that isn’t aligned with the rotation access of the stars. Sort of like the earths’ magnetic field isn’t aligned with the rotation access of the planet. And as that magnetic pole goes through our field of view, we get this burst of radius signal.

She’s the one that found this, discovered this, forced someone to look at the results and go here is this awesomeness. It’s not scruff in the data.

Fraser Cain: There’s something out there pulsing every – and I’ve got the number here, you ready for this?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: 1.3373020088331 seconds. In other words, every 1.33 blah blah seconds, we get a radar pulse like a lighthouse flashing us which must have been terrifying to – or amazing, astonishing to see an object with that kind of regularity out there in the Cosmos.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Luckily we see the signal and then figure out what it is. So I think we saw a star rotating at a thousand times a second at a distance that wasn’t very far away, it might start as terrifying but luckily, we’re like what is this? And then only after a while do we realize that some object is really far away and when it’s really far away, it takes you a while to figure out it’s just awesome. You skip straight to the awesome, bypass the terrifying.

Fraser Cain: Yeah, but this is a slow-spinning LGM 1 or PSRJ1921 plus 2153 is only turns a little over once a second while there are millisecond pulsars out there.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Right, so there are objects that are greater in mass than the sun, smaller in diameter than – like Manhattan basically. That are rotating a thousand times a second.

Fraser Cain: Right, and blasting out radio waves.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Right, as one does. As one does.

Fraser Cain: As one does. Yeah. So I guess once they had discovered this object, what was sort of the thought process? What did they think was going on, apart from it being scruff, how did they make that connection between it being a neutron star and what they were seeing in the data?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Well, you do look at things in multiple wave lengths and start to figure out okay, so what could be causing this, what is in that area, are there more of them, more of them were found and you just put the pieces together one by one and realize there’s only one thing this could be. And really if you think about any other object rotating that quickly, it would fling its surface off if it tried.

So you can’t get White Dwarf going that fast, you certainly couldn’t get the sun going that fast. You need something that is very tightly bound together and a black hole can’t exactly give off light every thousand of a second because black hole. So when you eliminate White Dwarf and recognize that black holes don’t emit light, that leaves you just with the neutron star.

Fraser Cain: And what is the process? We’ve done a whole show on pulsars and neutron stars so I don’t want to give the long version of this but what gets you that rapidly rotating thing that’s blasting out the radiation on a regular basis?

Dr. Pamela Gay: So as talked about a few episodes back, there’s this horrific thing called conservation of angular momentum. The side effect of this is that when ice skaters or stars, physics doesn’t care which you are, when they go from having their mass spread out over a large volume, the ice skater with her arms straight out to having their mass spread out over smaller volume, this is the ice skater bringing her arms in, you’re gonna speed up.

When you go from being a giant star to this residential bit, probably at the end of a supernova explosion, what’s left of you has to take whatever angular momentum that giant star had as it slowly rotated its giant self about its access. And when you go from perhaps being the size of Jupiter’s orbit or larger, down to Manhattan, you spin up a lot and it’s just that conservation of angular momentum coupled with supernova explosion.

Fraser Cain: So the conversation of a bigger momentum gets you the rotating speed, and the beam, it’s not that it’s actually pulsing and flashing like this, it’s that there is a beam coming out of these things.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Right, that’s the magnetic field. Its physics is very similar to how we get the beams coming out of the ends of quasars. You have magnetic fields that just like to shoot things out of their pulse in terms of you have rotation about an access, in this case, the dynamo for whatever reason isn’t completely aligned with the rotation access. That leads to a north and South Pole that repeals charged particles. As these particles move, they undergo all sorts of different physics that lead to changes in energy levels, that leads to release of radio waves.

Fraser Cain: All right. Let’s go back to Jocelyn Bell then. So that was her discovery. Let’s kind of go back and continue on her story. So she discovered this amazing thing. The neutron stars had been theorized but people hadn’t seen the –

Dr. Pamela Gay: Well, we hadn’t seen pulsars yet.

Fraser Cain: We haven’t seen the pulsars yet. Okay. And how was this received?

Dr. Pamela Gay: So neutron stars exist in binary systems. We knew they existed. It was just this idea of rotating with a misaligned magnetic field. That was entirely new. That is something that we still are like okay, that’s kind of huh. And so that was back in 1967 that they made these observations, worked on figuring things out, worked on figuring things out.

She went on finished her degree up. Went on to work at the University of South Hampton from 1968 to ’73. Went to the University College London. Was there ’74 to ’82. At that point, she went to Royal Observatory in Edinburg from ’82 to ’91. And then eventually she landed at the Open University from ’91 to 2001. And she was an amazing educator. She was someone who spent a lot of time in the classroom, spent a lot of time with students; she worked in projects at Greenwich Royal Observatory and their planetarium, serving on their board.

She worked as a tutor, a consultant. All sorts of different tasks. Eventually once she pretty much retired from active teaching, she went on to be a visiting professor at the University of Oxford where she was again focusing on mentoring and continuing research. What was interesting is all of this was kind of flavored with the yes, I did this awesome thing when I was young, I was a student.

Yes, my advisor got the Nobel Prize for it and I did not, but I was the student and if you’re gonna yell at faculty members when they try and blame their student for their failures, you should probably actually give them the prize when their students do something awesome. And that was just a very interesting way of saying look, just chill, in a very politically correct way that really I think has caused a lot of people to respect her across decades. It also led to her eventually becoming one of only two women in the UK to be senior professors. So she had that tenure dream that so many of us wish for and she managed to be one of the two women in the entire modern Western Nation that succeeded.

Fraser Cain: That’s an interesting response to this because she really was snubbed. It was the ’74 Nobel Prize in physics. A lot of fairly influential astronomers were pretty outraged that she wasn’t part of the winning team. I never understood that because they can – whatever the team that wins the Nobel Prize, they can kind of share it among a bunch of people.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Three people.

Fraser Cain: Up to three? Okay.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And Fred Hoyle was actually so incensed and raised such a stink that it’s considered that the stink that he raised about her not getting it, led to him not getting it in ’84. So you had people that were throwing such a stink, that they put their own careers in political jeopardy, and that doesn’t happen very often.

Fraser Cain: Right, and the gist of her response was I was a grad student, part of a team, the team was created by – was it Hamish and we made this discovery, but if you’re gonna blame him when everything goes sideways, you should also reward him when everything goes well for being the team leader which is a pretty classy way to sort of respond to being snubbed and not getting a Nobel Prize.

Dr. Pamela Gay: I think that also reflects a lot on her upbringing, a lot on her personality. She is someone who has always been deeply involved in the Quaker Church. She was raised in Northern Ireland where she attended a boarding school.

Actually, she had a really interesting childhood because she was attending the local they say college but it’s actually the local girls school, Lurgan College, and when she was about 11 years old, she took her exams to figure out what was the rest of her fate for her education and failed. And normally that means you go on to study for a trade. It means that you don’t go on to college.

This school that she’d been going up until that point wasn’t even one that normally taught sciences. They instead put emphasis on things like cooking and womanly skills, learning to sew. And a bunch of parents did throw a fit. They did get science into the curriculum but she still failed her national exams. And her family went on to send her to a private girls Quaker boarding school.

So she went onto Mount School in York and it was there that she finally started to do well in science. And it wasn’t that she hadn’t grown up surrounded by science; her dad was the architect of the Armagh Planetarium, and she’d been reading his science books but you need the passion and you need the education when it comes to exams and her parents made sure that she got all the opportunities that she deserved.

Fraser Cain: It was a very sort of high-level specialization at a very early age going right into physics and progressing along that when she had kind of failed the more general tasks. It’s pretty interesting.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And it really speaks to how different education is in other nations. Here she was at 11 telling her no, sweetie, you need to just go study trade. You’re not smart enough to do this professional work.

Fraser Cain: Maybe a hairdresser.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Right. Exactly. And her family was like nope. Sending your child away is a difficult task in a lot of cases and they recognized it was what was needed.

Fraser Cain: So we’ve talked a bit about her initial discovery. What were some other kinds of research that she was involved in?

Dr. Pamela Gay: I spent quite some time trying very hard to find how many papers that she’s done, like we did last week with Margaret Geller and I ran into this rather horrifying problem that there are a lot of J. Burnells, there are a lot of J. Bells because she’s published under both names so trying to chase her research across all the decades has been somewhat challenging you might say.

She has continued to work on pulsars throughout her life, looking at them in the optical, looking at them in the radio, looking for the awesome ones, looking for the weird ones, but chasing down any other research she might have done left me kind of confused in ADS because initials and last names that overlap make things difficult at times.

Fraser Cain: So you don’t have any more additional information than this one.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So the best I can say is she’s someone who continued to do a lot of work in pulsar’s and she’s someone that is modest to the point that I couldn’t find a website bragging about all the other stuff that’s she’s done over the years. That pleased me and made preparing difficult. So here you have this woman who is now in her 70s who is mostly retired. She stepped away from a lot of her board positions. She’s still plugging away at Oxford.

I got to see her give a talk on pulsar’s there. If you look up her initials and her last name in pulsar’s, you get a ton of papers but there’s no website that she’s written that says and I did this and I did this and here’s my CV and you can see all of the awards I’ve gotten. A lot of people have that and she didn’t feel the need to have that anywhere. That’s kind of cool.

Fraser Cain: Someone should help her with her social media profile.

Dr. Pamela Gay: It sort of falls into the category of grandma needing a social media profile. In this case, she’s one of those senior scientists who’s probably produced multiple generations of academic children at this point and I think she’s done good.

Fraser Cain: Now, had you met her? Have you seen her speak?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. I’ve seen her speak and I actually got to sit down and have a conversations with her. She’s the type of person – she’s gonna be blunt. She’s gonna – if you say something stupid, she’s gonna point it out to you in a very British way but she’s also gonna listen to the junior scientists in the room and she’s gonna look for ways to open doors and help them out. That dichotomy of not tolerating the fool while at the same time, looking to raise up the people who need opportunities is an awesome thing.

There’s too many people out there that will just let you say stupid things and at the same time, don’t work to help other people out and she’s not that person. She’s just forthright and does a good job and was very tolerant of my students who being mid westerners, Oxford is as far away from Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, as you can get. She sort of smiled and was British through all of the odd things that came out of their mouths occasionally.

Fraser Cain: I’m sure I would’ve been hilarious to talk to her. I know you have a bunch of friends at Oxford, right? What’s the sort of astrophysics program like there?

Dr. Pamela Gay: It’s one of the big ones out there. It’s a large department in terms of being physics and astronomy combined. One of my dissertation committee members came from there. I worked with people while I was there on the Texas Oxford Surveys as a graduate student. It’s the type of department like Harvard or Arizona where if you’re an astronomer, you can’t go through your career without at some point working with people from these places. They do a lot of work and they produce a lot of humans and it’s just a big astronomy center.

Fraser Cain: Yeah, we’re endlessly reporting on it with Universe Today on the research that they’re doing. Cool. Well, thanks a lot, Pamela.

Dr. Pamela Gay: My pleasure.

Recorder: Thanks for listening to Astronomy Cast, a non-profit resource provided by Astrosphere New Media Association, Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can find show notes and transcripts for every episode at Astronomycast.com. You can email us at info@astronomycast.com. Tweet us at Astronomycast. Like us on Facebook or Circle us on Google Plus. We record our show live on Google Plus every Monday at 12:00 p.m. Pacific, 3:00 p.m. Eastern or 2,000 Greenwich Mean Time. If you miss the live event, you can always catch up over at CosmoQuest.org.

If you enjoy Astronomy Cast, why not give us a donation? It helps us pay for bandwidth, transcripts and show notes. Just click the donate link on the website. All donations are tax deductible for U.S. Residents. You can support the show for free, too. Write a review or recommend us to your friends. Every little bit helps. Click support the show on our website and see some suggestions.

To subscribe to this show, point your podcatching software at AstronomyCast.com/podcasts.xml. Or subscribe directly from iTunes. Our music is provided by Travis Searle, and the show is edited by Preston Gibson.

]]>Ep. 359: Modern Women: Margaret Gellerhttp://www.astronomycast.com/2014/12/ep-359-modern-women-margaret-geller/
2014-12-15T17:44:00ZMargaret Geller is best known for her work on the large scale structure of the Universe, helping us understand the large clusters, super clusters and cosmic filaments that matter clumps into.

Transcript

Fraser Cain: Astronomy Cast episode 359, Margaret Geller. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos. We’ll help you understand only what we know but how we know what we know. My name is Fraser Cain; the publisher of the university and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville and a director of CosmoQuest. We’ve been waiting.

Pamela Gay: I’m doing well. How are you doing, Fraser?

Fraser Cain: Good. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this in the show but actually say professor at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville is actually really hard.

Pamela Gay: It is. It really is.

Fraser Cain: To rattle that off, I have to slow down and I have to really choose my words very carefully and I can often flub it up. That’s where I will flub it up so I encourage everyone in the audience to just go ahead and say that seven times, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville.

Pamela Gay: So if you want to know the full glory that I have to write into grants, it’s a professor in the Center for Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics Research Education and Outreach at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville.

Fraser Cain: And the director of CosmoQuest.

Pamela Gay: Yes and at line wraps.

Fraser Cain: As a visiting professor?

Pamela Gay: No, as an assistant professor, assistant research professor is my full title.

Fraser Cain: Right. There you go. That’s even more line wraps. Cool, so before we get into this week’s show which is where we continue our focus on some of the most influential female astronomers, we would like to talk about a place where a person could perhaps pick up some schwag.

Pamela Gay: Yes. So as we enter the holiday season, we know that hopefully many of you out there have people in your lives that you love and you want to give awesomeness to and we have our own small corner of awesomeness on the internet and that is our store on Spreadshirt. The URL is astrogear.spreadshirt.com and we have a variety of mugs and t-shirts and sweatshirts and pretty much everything is customizable so that you can get it in the color, the size, everything that you want.

I’ve put forward my favorite girl cut and boy cut stuff and we have everything from a shirt that says explore, planet Pluto classic that is a parody shirt of the Coke classic logo to Astronomy Cast apparel to CosmoQuest awesomeness so please get some good Astronomy Cast nerdery to give to all those you love.

Fraser Cain: Fantastic. All right so on to this week’s topic.

All right, Pamela, we’ve got something special this week. We’ve got a new sponsor for Astronomy Cast and that is casper.com and they make mattresses. The cool thing with this is they sent us both individually mattresses to test out. Did you get yours?

Pamela Gay: I did and it was this crazy situation where I kind of forgot to tell my husband there was a mattress coming and he opens the front door and there’s a box that is just big enough for a human to fit in which is actually really tiny when you think about mattresses.

Fraser Cain: Well, you got like the twin-sized one or the smaller one, right? Yeah, and so I got the king-sized one and what’s amazing is I don’t think the box for the king-sized one was any bigger than the one that you had and there was like, I don’t know what laws of physics they broke to get this mattress in there but it was folded and rolled and so they gave you this special knife to cut the thing open and then it’s sort of inflated and you have a full on king-sized mattress and it was super comfortable.

We actually have gotten rid of the old mattress and we’re using the Casper mattress. It’s a terrific mattress so we, now having tested it out, I really glad we got them as a sponsor for Astronomy Cast.

Pamela Gay: I have to say the same thing. I got an extra-large twin one to put on the day bed where I do a lot of reading and fussing around on my iPad and all that sort of stuff and initially I just kind of put it on top of the old mattress and that lasted for about two days and the old mattress sort of got ditched and it’s awesome, it’s squishy but firm-ish and it doesn’t have the problems our Tempur-Pedic mattress has of making you super hot.

Fraser Cain: Yeah, exactly. You’re not up against this kind of foam that gets you really hot. No, it’s great. So the good folks at Casper, in addition to sponsoring Astronomy Cast are providing you with a discount on your own mattress so if you go to casper.com slash astro and then use the promo code astro, you can get $50.00 off your own mattress and they will ship it to you, I think anywhere in the United States.

Pamela Gay: This means that you can fall asleep listening to Fraser and I while sleeping on the exact same mattress that Fraser and I are not on the same mattress but the same kind of mattress that we have.

Fraser Cain: So go to casper.com slash astro. Use the promo code astro and you’ll save $50.00 on your own mattress.

Margaret Geller is best known for her work on the large scale structure of the university, helping us understand the large cluster, super clusters in cosmic filaments that matter clumps into and before we dig into this, I actually just posted something on Twitter that was so cool. It was like what the universe would look like if you could see dark matter and talk about filaments, just like neurons and like spongy thread connected together and this is the kind of stuff that Margaret Geller helped us figure out. So who was Margaret Geller?

Pamela Gay: So Margaret Geller is a female astronomer who is at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astro Physics. She got her PhD from Princeton and was actually one of the first women to do that and she has spent her career basically trying to figure out what is the environment in which galaxies reside and how do we trace out this larger scale structure of all of the galaxies that turns out aren’t quite so evenly distributed as we might have once thought.

Fraser Cain: So before Margaret Geller did her work, what did astronomers think the universe was structured like?

Pamela Gay: Well, we were getting the idea that there are clusters and super clusters but we kind of thought that there was this variety of different-sized structures but perhaps it was just kind of evenly distributed kind of like a fractal pattern of well, here’s small galaxies, here’s big galaxies, here’s groups of galaxies but we weren’t entirely sure and it actually took Margaret Geller and a variety of colleagues across many different years working on a variety of different surveys to finally start to realize that our universe is kind of shaped like Swiss cheese and the first diagram to really, well, to be unintentionally punny to bring this to light was the Geller Huchra diagram that came out and it showed the red shifts of galaxies on the axis going out from the center and then it traced an arc across the sky.

So what happened was John Huchra who was a great observational astronomer went to the telescope and using spectroscopy measured the rate at which galaxies are moving away from us here on earth and took into account the motion of the solar system, the motion of the galaxy, all of that and figured out how these different velocities related more or less to the position of these different galaxies.

Putting that together got this really neat diagram that actually has what looks like a stick figure dude kind of centered in the bottom of it and that stick figure dude is the coma cluster and it turns out that the motions of the galaxies within the cluster stretch out the cluster into a stripy bit and all of the rest of the structures slowly are in this first diagram just tracing out this lace of structure. Over the decades, they’ve taken more and more red shift measurements and pushed out the distance and the density of galaxies that they’ve measured and discovered the great wall, a large wall-like structure of galaxies, found more and more clusters and found more and more voids and realized it’s not a random distribution. It’s actually very purposeful distribution of structures.

Fraser Cain: It’s interesting the way you’ve chosen these people. I’m sure you did this on purpose but how sort of the dark matter [inaudible][00:10:12] with the stuff we talked about last week, more about sort of the, some of these large structures that created tractor things like that and it’s the same concept about how you’ve got these large scale structures which are all kind of related. The dark matter is the thing that’s sort of organizing and harnessing them together into these shapes and the expansion of the universe is creating these voids and filaments, right?

Pamela Gay: What’s been really interesting is with each of these different women whose work we’ve been choosing to highlight, these are women who made discoveries that required long term year through year careful consolidating of multiple results to aggregate an understanding that couldn’t come quick and dirty. It required long term detailed analysis and they did that needed long term work to build a completely unexpected understanding of our universe.

So they essentially saw hints of well, I was trying to study this one thing but realized there’s something deeper going on here and they did the research necessary in Vera Rubin’s case to figure out there is dark matter affecting the rotation rates of galaxies. With Margaret Geller to realize that galaxies are clumped and there’s voids and to figure out what that physically means and how this all relates back to the Big Bang, these are long term studies that are just, literally changed how we see our universe. There’s no other way to put it.

Fraser Cain: Right so let’s talk a little bit about Margaret Geller then. So where did she go to school? Where did she sort of get her training?

Pamela Gay: So she as I said, got her PhD from Princeton, she got in 1975 in physics. She was one of the first women to do that. Previously she had gone to the University of California at Berkeley again getting a degree in physics and from there she went on to the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and in 1980, she got appointed to Harvard Colleges’ astronomy department in a tenured track position.

She was in that position for three years and then she actually left the tenure track and while she’s never come right out and said it, a lot of people have said for her that the reason she left was because of the amount of harassment and backstabbing and snarky comments that she had to face day after day after day while she was at Harvard and when you’re told enough times you’ll never get tenure because you’re a girl, well, it’s easier to say I’m just gonna step back and be a research professor, a research scientist.

If you’re on a tenure track and denied tenure, you’re given one year to find a new job. You’re out. You’re gone but if you instead step back and fall into a research track which is what she did through the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, you have a position as long as you can find funding for yourself. Now the weird thing about this from Margaret Geller is here’s a woman who literally changed how we view the structure of the universe. She has gone on to publish lots of papers, over 125 and I stopped counting.

She has received the MacArthur Genius Grant. She has become a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow at the American Physical Society, award after awards. She’s one of the top in her field and she actually has appointment of a full professorship or she did until she resigned in ’99. She was appointed a full professor without tenure at Harvard and she was offered a extremely important well-funded name chair. This is one of those things that you only get when the university basically says hey, you’re awesome, we’re gonna keep you. It was the Meloncrod Chair.

But they said we’ll give it to you but we’re not gonna give you tenure, we just won’t and she was the only person to ever be offered that chair and not given tenure. She actually neither said yes nor no to that position. She dug her heels in and said tenure.

Fraser Cain: And why not if not?

Pamela Gay: So that offer came in ’97. In ’99, it became clear that tenure wasn’t coming and so she resigned her professorship at Harvard to strictly be a senior research scientist at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Fraser Cain: Right. From the reporting side, a ton of what we do at the university comes out of the Harvard CFA. We get probably a couple of stories a week are coming out of Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics. There’s tons of really breaking news coming out of there.

Pamela Gay: It’s a complicated situation because Harvard is known as kind of being a cesspool for gender harassment. When I was there, I know of a woman in physics who was asked to document how many hours a day she spent with her newborn because there were complaints that she was actually using the maternity leave to get ahead on her research which was considered unfair so she had to document that she was spending enough hours with the child for it to be considered maternity leave instead of maternity leave or just extra time.

Fraser Cain: Right, research.

Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: Right.

Pamela Gay: Some of the things that you experience and are told, it just gets exhausting and I can fully understand having experienced things like this at many different places why Margaret made the decision she did and I have the utmost respect for her basically saying you’re offering me this amazing opportunity but you’re putting strongs on it and I’m not going to roll over and accept this prize with your strings. I want this prize only if you give it to me the same way you’ve given it to everyone else.

Fraser Cain: Right. So I guess is that where she currently is then?

Pamela Gay: Yes. She’s currently at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. This makes her a civil servant. It means that her funding comes predominantly from grant research that like me she’s in jeopardy of, and this is why I feel for it is I have the very similar position at my university being in a research center which means no matter how good I do, the second I don’t have enough grant money, I’m out of a job and this is something I’m currently facing.

Fraser Cain: Right. You’re always writing grants. You’re always looking to try and acquire money for the projects you need to work on because that’s what makes the whole machine run.

Pamela Gay: Right and universities really benefit from having research scientists. People in these types of positions, you bring in all of your own salary. You bring in money to fund people to work with you and then the university also takes a percentage off the top. The percentage varies from institution to institution anywhere from a few tens of percents to actually requiring you to bring in more than twice the amount of money that you need and they’ll take half of it.

So the money that you bring in benefits the institution, allows it to build new buildings, hire support staff. All of these different things keep the light on, the heat going, and fund students and fund computers for other people and do all of these other things that keep the institution going while the institution makes no promise to you and at any moment, you can be out the door. For her to say you know, this is where I’m gonna stick unless you give me tenure, that’s a brave thing because a name chair like the Meloncrod chair, it does come with money. It does come with a certain amount of security that helps and she said no, I’ll take my lot as a research scientist.

Fraser Cain: So what else has she worked on? She worked on obviously this original work back in the ’80s of large scale structure of the universe. You mentioned a great wall. What is that exactly?

Pamela Gay: So if you look in one direction across the sky in what’s called the first center for astrophysics red shift strip, that’s where you see the stick figure dude but when you look at the stick figure dude, you see coming off of his arms this kind of wall of galaxies and as you continue to look at fainter and fainter galaxies, that wall gets thicker and thicker and as you go to higher red shifts, you realize that wall has nothing on one that appears at a more distant red shift.

So our stick figure dude, he’s at a red shift that translates to moving at 10,000 kilometers per second. The great wall is out at 10,000 kilometers per second and spreads out all the way from 16 hours to about nine hours of right ascension across the sky and it’s kind of awesome and we’ll include pictures.

Pamela Gay: Yeah and it starts to fade off at about nine hours and what’s really cool looking at it is at about 16 hours, there’s this long spiky bit coming off of it and that long spiky bit is another galaxy cluster where the galaxies are moving so rapidly in the cluster that they spread out in this long finger. These are sometimes called the fingers of god in the red shift space.

Fraser Cain: You know, are these part of the Virgo super cluster or way farther away?

Pamela Gay: So looking at this, the stick figure guy that’s the coma cluster and one of the other fingers of god in this diagram is actually the Virgo cluster so we’re picking up a couple of different mass of clusters of galaxies and this wall which just extends all the way through this particular strip, so the one that really makes the wall start to stand out is the Center for Astrophysics two survey and it’s the first six slices put together that allows us all to stand out and with the picture –

Fraser Cain: I think through Geller’s biography and she also is the co-discoverer of hypervelocity stars.

Pamela Gay: Right. That is something because I don’t do that field of research, I totally forgot about. So hypervelocity stars are stars that get ejected through a variety of different interactions or supernova explosions and they’re basically these runaway objects that you can measure across a lifetime how they move across the sky and that’s kind of cool.

Fraser Cain: Yeah, absolutely like you can have like a three body interaction or you can have as you said the supernova going off and detonating and the blast kicking a star out of the entire galaxy which is pretty crazy. Cool, okay so what else should we know about Margaret Geller?

Pamela Gay: So she took things from just doing the initial maps of the one dimensional or two-dimensional rather slices through the universe to building complete 3D maps and her work led to some of the very first renderings that people saw on TV shows and in planetariums. She did an 8-minute video in 1989 called Where the Galaxies Are that created a voyage through this large scale structure and actually was awarded the CINE Gold Eagle Award. She went on to do a 40-minute film called So Many Galaxies, So Little Time that won awards for its graphic renderings from the I Tripoli in Zagreb and it was on display at the National Science Museum so our National Air and Space Museum.

So here you have a woman who does amazing science who is doing hard complicated work detailing red shifts, figuring out spectras, all observational work and then you have to figure out what theories match your observations to try and explain everything. She’s working to make sure her results get published in the top peer review journals and make sure they reach out to the public through accessible videos and easy scripts. She’s given lectures all over the world and she’s even on the National Public Radio here in the United States, their list of best commencement speeches ever. So she’s a woman who can communicate.

Fraser Cain: Right and that’s really, really important. I think that was Carl Sagan’s magic and a lot of people like, now we have Neil de Grasse Tyson but I think where Neil is really great at explaining things, you know, Margaret Geller did the research, understood the implications and then helped get them simulated in a way that regular folk, the public could wrap their heads around. I guess it’s a really good recent event like this is like what happened with interstellar right where Kip Thorne helped lead this simulation of the black hole, Gargantua whatever in interstellar, with such a level of precision that it both looked beautiful and had some useful scientific understanding for research so that’s the magic.

If you could take these what are just numbers, I mean they’re just right ascension, declination, you know, red shift, whatever, what kinds of composition of the galaxies and turn that into a 3D rendering that shows you what our local neighborhood looks like. That really helps put things in perspective. So, I mean that’s some of my favorite – when people do that, I’m really excited.

Pamela Gay: One of the things is actually articulates indirectly is one of the reasons often given for why she doesn’t have tenure is well, she’s cranky. She’s difficult. She’s grouchy. She doesn’t work well with others but then you look at the body of her work and she’s had collaborations that lasted decades. She’s worked with people from a whole variety of different backgrounds and when you see the range in working with top scientists and top creatives in projects in the private sector and she’s given multiple talks at the Chocotal Institute which is an indigenous people’s institution, clearly this is someone who does know how to collaborate and the irascible professor put it very well in a blog post where he says I can imagine that something like the following discussion must have gone on in these hallowed halls of Harvard University when the issue of tenure for Geller was being discussed.

Professor Y, and we’ve already promoted her to full professor. Shouldn’t we make it official by granting her tenure? Professor Z, she’s exactly one of the old boys. I don’t know if she would fit in over at the faculty club and besides, there’s just no evidence that she’s able to walk on water. This is a woman who’s done amazing things but –

Fraser Cain: If she can’t walk on water, no tenure.

Pamela Gay: Exactly.

Fraser Cain: Yeah, so then you know, I mean she’s still an active astronomer right now, still a researcher. Her career is not over so what is she working on like right now?

Pamela Gay: She’s part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Team. So when you see this amazing new renderings that allow you to fly all the way out to the cosmic microwave background radiation, she’s one of the people in that collaboration that is taking our understanding that started with this one narrow slice that showed coma cluster stick figure dude to now doing this massive wedge through the universe that is allowing us to test models that show how our galaxies’ structure has evolved from the cosmic microwave background to today. That’s just awesome.

Fraser Cain: She combines a large deep complete red shifts survey with a weak lensing map for the deep lens survey so I guess this is dark matter lensing distribution matched with red shift survey.

Pamela Gay: This is adding the dark matter component to the luminous matter component so that you can start to see how is it that light matter does and in some cases doesn’t trace out the dark matter by looking at how the dark matter leaves evidence of itself by distorting light passing through it.

Fraser Cain: There was some great research that just came out just the last couple of weeks about how quasars line up strangely within these filaments of dark matter.

Pamela Gay: That sort of makes sense if you think about it in terms of quasars trace out galaxies that are undergoing massive star formation in some cases undergoing collisions, all sorts of activities that happen more in the early universe. The dark matter is the places that were, it was in its highest density, it pulled the luminous matter in so luminous matter flowed in to this dark matter scaffolding, started forming structures, these structures interacted. The structures were the first galaxies and those galaxies were interacting in these filaments of dark matter that allowed all of this material to be drawn together.

Fraser Cain: So one thing I just did here, I just put her name into astro ph into archive.org, the astrophysics and for her name and she’s in 118 papers and that’s just one for astro ph.

Pamela Gay: That’s actually low so the number –

Fraser Cain: That’s not all the papers. This is just the ones that came out since astro ph was keeping track of them.

Pamela Gay: Right, exactly and yeah.

Fraser Cain: That like four years maybe is what I think it’s about.

Pamela Gay: The number that I found was in 2001. She had 127 published articles since 1982 and then there’s been like another hundred since then and yeah.

Fraser Cain: So just hundreds so that is a very prolific –

Pamela Gay: Yes.

Fraser Cain: Cool. All right, well, thanks a lot, Pamela.

Pamela Gay: Thank you.

Fraser Cain: Thanks for listening to Astronomy Cast, a nonprofit resource provided by Astrosphere New Media Association, Fraser Cain, and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can find show notes and transcripts for every episode at Astronomy Cast.com. You can email us at info@astronomycast.com. Tweet us at Astronomy Cast. Like us on Facebook or circle us on Google Plus. We record our show live on Google Plus every Monday at 12:00p.m. PST, 3:00p.m. EST or 20:00 GMT. If you miss the live event, you can always catch up over at CosmoQuest.org.

If you enjoy Astronomy Cast, why not give us a donation? It helps us pay for bandwidth, transcripts and show notes. Just click the donate link on the website. All donations are tax deductible for US residents. You can support the show for free, too. Write a review or recommend us to your friends. Every little bit helps. Click support the show on our website to see some suggestions. To subscribe to the show, point your podcasting software at Astronomy Cast.com/podcast.xml or subscribe directly from iTunes. Our music is provided by Travis Searle and the show is edited by Preston Gibson.